The End of Sparta: A Novel

PART ONE

Holy Leuktra

CHAPTER 1

Mêlon Comes to Leuktra

A cart approached raising a high dust trail. A few more hoplite soldiers for the outmanned army?

Atop the hill, in the center of the plain of Leuktra, a lookout man of Epaminondas was already yelling out the news. Proxenos, the Plataian, had spotted the wagon in the distance—but only one, a single-ox cart maybe, making its way up the switchbacks from the town of Thespiai. That surely meant Mêlon from Mt. Helikon had come to battle at Leuktra as he had promised. He was late, but here nonetheless for the final reckoning with the Spartans. And it looked as if he came with two other men as well.

He’s here. Mêlon of Thespiai is here with Epaminondas, or least almost here. Proxenos did not wait for the wagon to near. He ran down to the camp of Epaminondas to tell his generals that the apple, the mêlon of the Spartans’ dreaded prophecy had at last come to battle—as if the awaited man were now worth a thousand, if not five thousand at least. The presence of Mêlon, the apple, would win over the hesitant horsemen and the scared farmers and the ignorant tanners and potters as well. Could not the council start this very night and muster the army for battle? Oh yes, Proxenos thought, all the silly superstitious Boiotians would at last fight now. They would battle not for right or even their land, but buoyed by the idea they would destroy the Spartan army with this aging cripple of prophecy, Mêlon, son of Malgis, at their side and General Epaminondas at their front.

Mêlon saw ahead the lookout running down the hill, but made no point of it. He was in the back of the cart and stretched his legs out. The Thespian also ignored the singing of one of his slaves, Gorgos, beside him. Instead, he pointed to the other with the reins, Chiôn, to find the good ground and let old loud Gorgos be. Mêlon’s feet without sandals were now dangling from the open backside. His old, twisted leg was wrapped. He had bound it with leather straps for battle. Mêlon had wedged himself among the food and arms, propped up in the back of the deep cart—and had just woken up again, when a wheel jolted out of the stone ruts and slammed back in.

The groans of the ox Aias, as the wagon kept uphill a bit longer, had helped to rouse Mêlon from his dark returning dreams of a high mountain hut. The shack was not the one on his own farm on the uplands of Mt. Helikon. Not at all.

Instead, it was alien and had something to do with this impending war, and seemed to be shared somehow with Gorgos. But it was far away, cold—and, he sensed, to the dreaded south. How he wished the dream interpreter Hypnarchos were here, with his red-lettered scrolls that made sense of the nonsense of the night visions, and taught which dreams were false and which could prove true. In these apparitions, this shed was also shrouded in rain and winter fog, high in spruce trees somewhere amid the clouds. The hazy peaks around it were foreign, and not those of his Helikon. His Gorgos was there too, just as he was here now, still singing his Tyrtaios, but different looking and sounding as well. His other two slaves, Nêto and Chiôn, they were also in this far-away vision. He remembered that much and accepted that the dreams became more frequent as the war loomed closer.

But Mêlon was now fully awake and he sensed Gorgos was, too—likewise rousted from the same dream. Mêlon looked about Boiotia again as the wagon slowly creaked past the hill’s summit to a flat meadow. He saw no shed of his dreams anywhere, but he heard his name shouted by some guards off to the right. Otherwise, the cut grain fields were quiet and empty. Not a Spartan yet to be seen. A brief lull had taken hold of the countryside. The early summer threshing was long over. The grapes had their first color on the greener hillsides.

So all was quiet for tomorrow’s battle. For all the summer heat, his Boiotia was not nearly as dry, not so barren as he feared it might be. Towering Mt. Parnassos was at his rear. A peak higher than Helikon, with a touch of the undying snow even in summer. To his left rose rocky Ptôon by the sea. Up there was the temple of Apollo. He had hiked the pathway with Malgis—even after his father had stopped seeing the older Olympian gods, and had turned instead toward worship of the Pythagoreans, whose god was Lord Logos, and whose priests were philosophers, claiming that the divine was not just more powerful than men, but more moral as well. On behalf of this god, long ago his father Malgis had died at the battle at Koroneia. For all this land, long ago Mêlon had ruined his leg against the Spartans. And for all the Boiotians, his only son, the best of the three of the Malgidai, was tomorrow willing to ride into the spears of the Spartan horse.

As he scanned the plains and hills around Leuktra, Mêlon saw now how the farmer creates his own better world of trees and vines. He gets lost in it, and needs someone to bring him out of his refuge. His son had now done that for him and so brought him to the grand vision of Epaminondas, but then, again, Lophis had never fought the Spartans. Any who did, as Mêlon had, might wish to never again, and so would remember why the world of the orchard and vineyard was far safer than the chaos of what men produce in town. Yet then again, no man can be the good citizen alone on his ground, although Mêlon had tried that for thirty years and more, in between his service for the Boiotians. A farm may hide failure, be a salve to hurt and sorrow, even disguise fear and timidity, but it cannot be a barricade of peace when there is mayhem outside its walls. And there was now plenty of that at Leuktra.

As he neared the creek of Leuktra, Mêlon saw again from the jostling wagon that his Boiotia was a holy place. It was no pigsty of marshes and dullards the way the Spartans slandered it. If it were, why would they be here this day to take it? It was time anyway for this settling up tomorrow, Mêlon thought, even if it meant that the Malgidai would have to mortgage their all—himself, Chiôn, Gorgos, and Lophis, maybe even the farm itself. The fight was not yet about Epaminondas freeing the slaves of the south, he assured himself. Not entirely tomorrow. Nor about the Pythagorean dream of we’re all equal that would take the gods to enforce. Nor about the promises of oracles and seers that Mêlon was the apple who had to fight at Leuktra for Epaminondas to win—and for a Spartan king to die.

Apart from all that, Mêlon and his son Lophis would battle just this once more to push the invaders off his soil. Or at least he thought he would, since he had not yet met this Epaminondas—this huge jar into which everyone seems to throw their dreams, fears, and hopes. The seers said the men of his age were not like the grandfathers of their grandfathers, who had saved the Hellenes from the Persians at Marathon. Mêlon’s debased generation was said not even to have been the equal of their grandfathers, who had helped the Spartans stop Athens from gobbling down Hellas. But now the Boiotians—right here, tomorrow—they could at least end Sparta? That would prove that the polis was not through yet, that the blood of the old heroes of Hellas, of Miltiades, of Lysander and of Pagondas, still ran in the veins of the Boiotian farmers at Leuktra.

So a sense of contentment, of eudaimonia had come over Mêlon, son of Malgis, as they had left his farm this past morning. For its vines and trees, and tall grass—and for fear of being found wanting in the eyes of the dead—he would pick up his spear. For his son Lophis, and his son’s young wife Damô and their boys and their neighbor Staphis who had braved the hoots of the Thespians in the assembly—and for the simple folk of his Thespiai who never had harmed Sparta—he would fight Sparta and seek to end Sparta. Staphis with the smelly single cloak and a bleary eye and his stick arms was the least likely hoplite in Thespiai—and the only one who had joined the Malgidai for battle. Even now Mêlon recalled the rabble in the assembly back home, who had hooted the vine man Staphis down when he alone had called for the town to muster with Epaminondas.

We know, Staphis had screamed back at them, that the Pythagoreans will join Epaminondas, whoever this general is. Vine growers rarely had the ear of the assembly and he was not about to lose his moment as he bellowed out more. And we know his fellow Thebans will as well. And those who could use plunder from the dead on the battlefield may wish to go to Leuktra. Others who hate Sparta will line up in the front rank. But why should we farmers on the high ground of Helikon care whether these Spartan invaders torched the wheat land of the lowlanders below or trample our vines? Why would I, with two daughters and a gout-footed wife, risk a spear in my gut, when my grapes are overripe and rot on the vine for want of pickers? Why? Well, I will tell you: for the name of Helikon, of course. And for the pride of our Thespiai, and for holy Boiotia that bore and raised us. Yes, for the idea that no Spartan will ever again barge into the ground of their betters, and that on the morrow, we shall end Sparta for good as we knew it. For all that, I, Staphis, will walk alone to find a slot in the front line of my general Epaminondas.

Now remembering all the lofty words of the defiant Staphis, as he neared the enemy encamped at Leuktra, Mêlon sensed, like Staphis, that decay was not fated. Decline was a choice, a wish even, to idle and to lounge and willingly to become lesser folk, rust that appeared to feed on the hard iron of what their parents had wrought. If Boiotia were to fall, it would not be because of Lichas and his Spartans, or Persians from across the sea, or the wild tribes who swept from Makedon, but because lesser Boiotians simply let them in, preferring wine and flute-girls to blood and iron.

The farmers of Helikon had the good on their side. They had never yet marched down into Lakonia to bother the Spartans. Mêlon had never sung war songs like the war-loving Spartans did. But now, today, they were burning his homeland of Boiotia, and nearing his polis Thespiai. Until now, for much of his life, he certainly had not had much feeling one way or another about their helot slaves—at least not until this summer. But the Spartans had provoked Epaminondas, and now the general in fury would risk thousands of Boiotian farmers killed for the freedom of the Messenian serfs and to end Sparta for good. Is that the nemesis that the hubris of Sparta has earned—and their ruin that was to come at last? But was there another way to stop them? Surely not, at least not for good. A wall of stone, a mountain perhaps could block a line of advancing Spartan hoplites, but not other mere men, at least as he had known them until now. A man, Mêlon now smiled at his wild thoughts, could think of a lot as he rested in the back of a cart on the way to war.

Each spring, the tall men of Sparta from the south came to torch when the grain of Boiotia grew heavy and dry. This summer, almost on a town crier’s schedule, King Agesilaos had ordered the other king, his royal partner, Kleombrotos, to bring in another army. The two promised that Boiotia would be theirs before the rumors of war and promises of revolution spread to the south and took flesh—before the rest of Hellas got drunk, they also said, on the mad idea that the poor man with nothing could vote in the assembly right alongside the noble with everything and put the worse in charge of the better. All that would ruin what was once good in Hellas. Or so they also said.

Boiotia knew that Kleombrotos, if his army won at Leuktra tomorrow, would then unleash his henchman Lichas to kill the Pythagoreans of Thebes. Lichas would round them all up, since their talk about equality was at the root of this democracy—and their notion that their one god judged men on their merit rather than, like the Olympians, by their power and nobility. The Spartans warred not just against the Boiotians, but against the notion of democracy itself.

Mêlon knew Epaminondas was right to face the Spartans down, even though he did not believe he was fated to kill a Spartan king or that any such silly prophecy was needed in the ranks to win. He was here instead to do some big thing. He would accomplish something different from the last years, to end his quiet and plunge into the roaring storm’s surf rather than hear it crash from a safe distance. Perhaps the muscles of his Chiôn and his own skill with the spear would put an end to it all. Who better than these two veterans could stop the Spartans? Tomorrow was as good a day as any to start, here at this fight beside Leuktra creek.

Then a strong breeze blew across his face from the south, and Melôn was back out of his dreams of the day and fully awake again, once again the lame farmer from Helikon and no longer the would-be savior of Hellas. The wagon had pulled up well beyond the outer edge of the Theban camps, almost alone on the upland plateau. A thousand tents spread down the slopes to the gully at Leuktra. The white creek of Leuktra was mostly a trickle by summer, more fouled and black with moss than white with running foam. Finally the three neared the flat top of the hillock most distant from the center of the Theban camp. Some oaks and a laurel tree there shaded a small spring that fed a clean stony pool. Only a few Theban tents were this far up, across the way on the neighboring rise above their army below.

Gorgos was still singing his most peculiar Spartan tune—It is a noble thing for a good man to die, falling among the front-fighters, fighting on behalf of his fatherland. The harsh beat sounded like some nonsense from an ancient Spartan war song of the poet Tyrtaios—even though the three in the wagon were supposed to be Boiotians, pledged to fight for General Epaminondas, the final arrivals from Mt. Helikon to the Boiotian camp.

Gorgos had kept on with his song even as the wagon passed by the Boiotian campfires—all the louder, the more numerous the enemy tents appeared on the hills across the gully. In his defense, he often claimed that before the Malgidai had captured him he too had been a helot, a noble of Messenia born far to the south, but one Spartan freed and Spartan trained. Now with seventy summers and maybe more behind him, his gravelly voice kept croaking out Doric song lines like, fighting on behalf of his fatherland. But whose fatherland did he mean?

The closer the wagon had come to the army of the Boiotians, the wilder the mind of Gorgos became. He decided now that he did not like at all this idea of fighting against his old benefactors, the Spartans. Not even if they were here up north tramping on his master’s ground and he had not been with them for more than twenty years. Only with the threat of the lash had Mêlon dragged him with armor to the stream here at Leuktra. And Gorgos suspected that these Boiotian pigs were not fighting tomorrow just as defenders against the Spartans’ invasion, at least not entirely, or even that this bloodletting would be the end of it. Instead if they won tomorrow, if they beat their betters, they would promise endless battles to come in the south for Epaminondas. He was their ragged dreamer who got them drunk on notions that they were going to be liberators and freers of chattel slaves and so become better even than the slave-owning gods on Olympos themselves—notions far more dangerous than fighting for mere plunder, pride, or revenge. Could not a brave man kill that faker, slit his throat, cleave off his head—and so save untold men from dying tomorrow?

Yet Gorgos still kept arguing with himself as he chanted, not quite a Spartan lover, for he was also loyal to Mêlon in his way, and had also known as a young helot the hard stroke of a Spartan lash, one that cut far deeper than did the Thespian. His grudge was more with the madman Epaminondas who wanted endless war, not mere battle of an hour or two—a total war and not just to defeat Sparta but to end the Spartans. And not to free a helot or two, but to free all of them.

Even his recluse master Mêlon would no doubt listen to the firebrand Epaminondas. His entire clan on Helikon already talked of setting up democracy, such a fantasy where dogs and birds could vote alongside landowning citizens—of marching into his Sparta, of building vast free citadels in the Peloponnesos of towering stone, of liberating the helot serfs so that the Spartan lords would finally have to farm and could not fight, of turning Hellas upside down and putting the worse over their betters. And all this craziness for what, old Gorgos now asked himself on the eve of battle. If his master in the back of the wagon was mumbling in his dreams, why could not he as well? The Boiotians claimed a Pythagorean lie that all creatures who bleed are equal and all our souls become happy in the hereafter for lives well lived. If victory tomorrow led to that lotusland, well, then, better defeat and death for his master and himself in the noble Hellas rather than to live on in the new bastard one.

As Gorgos kept dreaming and chanting out his poet Tyrtaios on the ride to the battlefield, he forgot again they were already passing amid the army of Epaminondas. Soon he was back in his trance as his singing returned to his childhood in Lakonia. The slave closed his eyes. He could still dream, more so now than ever. Chiôn had the reins, not he. Here on this eve of the end, all the more he could feel thousands of Spartans were nearby in the hills across the plain. He thought he could see, even feel the front line of the enemy Spartans ahead, thousands of tall men in red capes and long black braids. They would be grim still—just like he remembered them as a boy the first time he saw hoplites under Brasidas. The Spartan Homoioi had all been marching to pipe music, just like they did when he was later captured at the Nemea battle. Their shields would be out chest-high, the spears all lowered. Breastplates, helmets, greaves all would be dazzling in shiny bronze—horsehair crests bobbing, scarlet cloaks flapping in the wind. All in perfect order. A porcupine, as deadly as it was beautiful—with quills out and ready for stabbing.

Gorgos thought he could almost see that death walk of his noble red-caped killers. Oh how he wished he were with them and not here with the soon to be losers at his side. Sparta was always short of men, and here he was untapped, unused, a Boiotian slave no less. The helot even began tapping his foot, even in the back of Mêlon’s wagon, alongside the dozing master. Who cared, since they would all die anyway in a few hours. Boiotians always fall when they meet the better men of Sparta. So it did not matter that an old helot in Boiotia sang the songs of the enemy or woke up his sleeping master.

Then a hard slap. Gorgos almost fell off to the road. The song ended. The other slave, the driver Chiôn—Snowy most thought chiôn meant—had let loose of the reins, turned, and given Gorgos his backhand. He slapped Gorgos for no more than his bad verses, or so it at least seemed. Chiôn stayed silent, even as he stood tall again, always a head higher than any around him, now driving amid the rising dust. He was the young one, Gorgos the far older slave. In his years of his pout and isolation, their master Mêlon had let both of his two farm slaves run almost wild. They managed the vineyards on Mt. Helikon more than did their master. Now with this new notion of Epaminondas and talk of freeing of the helot serfs to the south, not much longer could a liberator own other Hellenes anyway.

Mêlon himself woke yet again to the sound of the slapping of Gorgos. In the back of the wagon, he had fought with his own visions. Maybe he should have long ago killed these two slaves, inasmuch as both were smarter and stronger—and far angrier—than their master, just as he thought he was to all others on Helikon. If Chiôn and Gorgos survived the battle, if they were freed, even in his dotage Gorgos would kill too many of the good, as if he were some whip of the Spartans; and Chiôn would kill too many of the bad, as if he thought he had the rights of some fury god. It was a dangerous thing to free slaves with good minds and longer memories. Who could guarantee that they would kill each other and so cancel themselves out, before the corpses of the guilty and innocent alike piled up?

War, Mêlon at least knew, is the great torch that brings such heat and light to everything and everyone. Nothing can hide from the god Polemos, not even the clever mind of Gorgos who now sang like a traitor. But then he saw Chiôn smiling; did the Spartans have any idea of how many of the red capes that one would kill? Mêlon went on and imagined that, like some high mountain bear, his Chiôn might take down all these southerners, drag them to the nearest oak, hang them up by their heels with their red tunics, and let the dogs and birds do the rest. Or so he remembered Chiôn mumbling, that and more still: that spearing was too good for them. Chiôn talked more like that because he was now close to the moment of battle, to being freed at last to make all things right, as he promised, for his master, for his slave Nêto, for the good son of Mêlon, Lophis, for freeing slaves of the artificial laws of the polis that said some are free, others not.

The cart stopped. Gorgos unhitched a sweaty Aias. He roped and hobbled the ox to the tongue. The helot gave enough slack so that the beast could drink from the creek water. Cagey Gorgos had guided Chiôn well here. He laughed out loud, as he thought how clever he was to have known the spot in advance—maybe as a back escape path down the hill should the slave Chiôn turn feral and try to kill him right here? Or was it a way to get out the backside, should the Boiotians lose—or even win? About four stadia away on an opposite gentle rise, the three could make out through the haze where King Kleombrotos and his horde of Spartans had settled down for the night. The ditch and brush ramparts of the invading Spartans were already finished—and all done in just the two days since the king’s arrival in Boiotia. The outline of shadowy Mt. Kithairon loomed to the enemy’s rear.

Mêlon knew how to compute numbers. He had long ago measured borders when the farm squabbles broke out on the upper plots on Helikon. Now he saw there was a far larger army of invaders than there was in the new Boiotian tent town of Epaminondas below them. What had his son Lophis talked him into—and into what had Epaminondas talked the Boiotians? The old man turned to Chiôn. I gauge at least ten thousand of them, maybe twelve or even fifteen thousand more Spartans over there, who need killing. Three to two, against Epaminondas, maybe closer to two to one. For all his fine talk of freeing the unfree, that is all that is left. Either they keep ravaging Boiotia or we stop them. You stop them only by knocking down the royal Spartan bunch on the right wing where they need killing the most. Only the spear arm stops them. Nothing else. They won’t parley, won’t surrender, won’t stop—until killed. No need to count them. They aren’t going anywhere. Why should they when they outnumber us?

Chiôn paid him no heed. Mêlon could smell the campfires of the Spartans as they roasted their sacrificial goats for their early meal. He kept talking to himself. For stadia well beyond their ditch and camp wall, early evening fires were flickering everywhere on the hills opposite, on the other side of the gully in the growing twilight. The whole world tonight seemed Spartan. How were they to beat men like that, said to be better and known to be more numerous? King Kleombrotos, Mêlon said to himself, if he wins, he will be supping inside the seven gates of Thebes. By tomorrow at dusk we will all speak Doric on our way down into Hades as well.

The two slaves still ignored their babbling master and kept unpiling their gear.

CHAPTER 2

Lichas the Spartan

Across the way, the Spartans were working, not thinking—stacking brush as a wall on their backside. They had the dry streambed and now a ditch as rampart at their front. Unlike the Boiotian camps, there was order here in their huge circle—a taxis, a plan of marching hoplites in drill and to pipe music. On this night before the battle, the stewards on cue brought kettles of black barley soup and spits of roasted goat. Over there, Gorgos knew, stalked bald Lichas, son of Lichas, the best of the old Spartan breed. Lichas had fought the Athenians forty summers earlier. He knew enough of Epaminondas that if the fool had his way in making everyone equal who were not, then there would be no place for the better ones like Lichas himself in the new softer Hellas. Only Lichas and a few of his Spartan henchmen stood in the way between the old and better ways of the Hellenes and this polis-wrecker Epaminondas.

Now in confidence Lichas went from campfire to campfire rousing his men on. Comb your hair who have it, men. Shave your upper lips clean. Look like the better men you are when we face these pigs. We are no different from the tall men who once broke the Persians at Plataia. Why, we could still sail into Athens, as our grandfathers did, and tear down its walls. So chant your Tyrtaios. Tomorrow, right at mealtime we eat on their acropolis, atop their Kadmeia. The Boiotian pigs? Why, they will soon sup in Hades. Listen to your king. Our Kleombrotos, king of Sparta, speaks at torchlight.

His hulking son Antikrates followed. He was a giant of a man outfitted like a battling Ajax or Achilles depicted on the red clay pots from Athens. The panoply was all Spartan style, but heavier and thicker and better than most armor of the peers, his scarlet cloak a deeper hue and with a silver trim. Few others could carry the weight of such bronze. His willow shield was ten palms wide, as round as the best turned cartwheel, hewn from the copses on the low slopes of Taygetos. Bull leather padded the inside, and on the outside was hammered a tin lambda for Lakedaimon, the home of Sparta. His thick left forearm alone could hold it chest high. Two dented bronze greaves covered his shins with an olive oil sheen—and each with two intertwined serpent bosses, no less, hissing and biting as they wound around each other down to his feet. More oily leather sheets were stitched to the greaves’s insides. Antikrates wore the old-style chest plate, all cast and hammered bronze, with silver clasps joining the back sheet to the front. Small finger-length silver running stags with six-pointed horns were hammered about, all with eyes of gold, of intricate design, patches that covered the holes and cracks from twenty spear thrusts from Arkadians, Athenians, and Boiotians, fool hoplites all who died thinking they could reach the flesh of Antikrates through the bronze scales of his armor.

His pteruges—wide leather straps weighted with iron square rivets—hung down from his breastplate, flapping about to protect his lower parts, should the long leather apron on the bottom of his shield fail. The helmet crest of Antikrates—black stallion hair, mixed in with a white mare’s tail—bobbed a foot higher than his head, making him seem taller, more savage still. A bit of beard and two narrow eyes were all that peeked out from his bronze helmet, as if there were some beaded lizard behind the horrific metal mask. Or perhaps there was, since few had seen Antikrates without his helmet. Haima—blood—he called his spear of cornel wood with a black iron head that went nine feet from its bronze butt spike up to the sharpened point. The shaft was a thumb or more thick, too heavy for any but his father Lichas to stab with. All this was worth more than five oxen, or a field slave of thirty years. The panoply had once been worn by Lichas in his flower until he passed it on to Antikrates, lest one day the old man fall in battle and have Haima carried off by an Athenian or Theban lord.

The Spartan even with the weight of his armor was as straight as his father Lichas was stooped. Antikrates scowled and slapped any helot servant who was slow to get out of his way: Shield against shield—crest against crest we fight. Ares is our god. Artemis and Pan are our henchmen. While the Boiotian generals across the gully parleyed and bickered and voted, these invaders were united, all eager to raise their spears. They were worried only that the Boiotians might run rather than fight them. The enemy camp told this story of Spartan order well enough. Shields, thousands of them, were arranged in neat concentric circles. Most rested on wooden tripods. A lean-to of twenty spears—not one out of kilter—stood next to every fire. Helots ran from campfire to campfire with pots of oil and jugs of wine. Order governed the camp, so too order on the battlefield—Spartan eunomia.

As the hoplites prepared their mess, dutiful Messenian slaves had taken out their sheepskin rags. They dipped them in olive oil, polishing their masters’ breastplates and greaves. Others brushed their horsehair crests. Still more braided the long tails of their masters’ hair. Amid them all, Antikrates now left the side of his father. He marched through the camp after an older and toothless red-cape Sphodrias, who liked to sneak into the enemy camp and slit the throats of the snoring. The two kept bellowing out as they stalked past the fires, Get out your whetstones. Sharpen your cleavers. Our blades will go through these pigs as spits do fat pork. Sharper still. Always file your iron, men. Ready your iron for your king.

Finally King Kleombrotos himself appeared and yelled out to his Spartan subjects. He was standing on the back of a wagon surrounded by a throng of his royal hoplites. The lord was a young sort, maybe no more than forty years. As the king of the Agiad line, he had already held his office for the past nine. Kleombrotos had not wanted to fight this day. He had headed north for Thebes only because he feared the wrath of Lichas and the ephors—overseers who audited the king’s campaign—should he slink and file out of the plain without battle. Although he knew his Spartans would win, Kleombrotos did not expect to survive the battle. Even back in the south he had heard of the helot Nêto’s prophecies of his own doom at White Creek where he would meet her master Mêlon. Kleombrotos feared Epaminondas as much as he did Zeus. Now the eye blinks he had suffered since childhood, and his bad head tilt of the past year, made him talk more in the fashion of a slave or half-helot than a king of Sparta.

"Men of Sparta. Another spring in Boiotia, so another victory over the pigs. Nothing ever changes for us, the better men of Sparta—unchanged since the days of the founder Lykourgos. Right after our breakfast and wine, we go out. You know the Spartan way: We fight each other for targets and enemy hoplites. Pray there will be enough of them for our spears. We go always to the right across the field—rightward all the way to their rear without a break in our stride. Tomorrow we mass twelve deep—not our eight shields of the past. All the better to crush the Theban pigs at the first spear thrust. No worry about our flanks. Men of Sparta, Homoioi tôn Lakaidaimoniôn, we have more good men there than we need. Our army has wide horns, more men than we need on the flanks."

But the voice sounded too high, too shrill for a Spartan king. The king spoke as if battle with Epaminondas were to be avoided rather than sought. He finished weakly, If every Spartan peer, if every ephor, if even a Spartan king should fall tomorrow, so be it. It would be worth that great price to kill Epaminondas and stop his democratic madness. Follow me to victory. Follow me up their Kadmeia.

His army murmured. Only a few raised their fists at their king’s notion that any Spartan would need die at all against these pigs. Most of the companions in disgust turned to finish off their wine. Then the pipes took up and the king’s guard took the frightened royal into his tent. Before the men laid out their reed bedrolls, and smothered their cook fires, Lichas the ancient ephor climbed back up on the wagon bed. He bounded up as if he were no more than twenty. The brute Kleonymos, captain of the king’s guard, stood on one side, Lichas’s son Antikrates on the other, his shield still on his forearm. Both were a quarter royal and, better yet, claimed bloodlines from Brasidas himself. The two always had fought side-by-side and argued only over the number of their kills. Yet the sly night-killer Sphodrias came too and towered behind them all, even if he usually sought to hide rather than strut his size as he crawled about the campfires of the enemy. He planned this very night to go behind the lines and bring back a Theban shield—or, better, a hand or foot.

Lichas was becoming tired of his reluctant king. He could care not a whit whether the odds, or the omens, or the weather, or the battleground favored either Spartans or Boiotians. He was of the old ones, a Spartan like Leônidas. An ephor. In defeat or victory, Lichas, son of Lichas, of the greatest polis of Hellas, in its greatest age. He would fight like his grandfathers at Thermopylai. He would kill Boiotians and he would bring untold misery to them and endless glory to his own. If their own king was fated to die, better to rid them of a royal not fit for the Spartan office. The women of Sparta claimed Lichas was even uglier than Kleombrotos, and they boasted it was due to the scars of battle, not the bad draw at birth.

My peers, my equals. We muster before dawn. This time the pigs claim they will go over us tomorrow and on into Sparta. The fools claim they will not slink back into their sties as in the past but will fight for all sorts of silliness under the silliest of all, Epaminondas. They want us to be all the same, to ruin Hellas and to call it democracy—to end our beloved Sparta as we know it. We say the best men are best to keep the weaker ones secure. That’s why we come into pig land to collect our rent for keeping the swine penned up and safe.

He liked the sound of his roaring voice. Lichas could not stop. Whether we have to fight the Titans or Olympians, the verdict is the same, always the same. You Spartans are born, raised for the fight against anyone, at any moment we please. We all will die without it. I ask our seers here—will it be young Kleonymos, the tower of the phalanx, or my boy Antikrates, who breaks the guard of Epaminondas and sends him and his fools to Hades? Which one? Tell us now. Place your bets before sunrise when we throw the knucklebones. As for me, your Lichas here—Lichas, ephor son of the ephor Lichas? I vote for none of them. Only for me. I’m the one, the best killer of them all.

He let out an eerie high-pitched laugh, even as more Spartans drifted back from their campfires to hear him. The growing throng was calling out Lichas as loudly as they had been quiet listening to their stuttering king. The more he swaggered and talked, the more the men in their long capes cheered Lichas. Behind such a Spartan, they felt safe. They could boast they were no worse men than those Spartans of old who had followed King Leônidas against the Persians. If there were dikê still in the vale of Lakonia, any justice at all, this man Lichas, without birthright of a king, long ago rightly would have been their king. Or so they mumbled in admiration at the four tall men on the wagon.

Let the Boiotians talk of the faker god Pythagoras, who preached that all men were equal to the worm or sparrow. Let them shout for Epaminondas and the new fantasy cities to rise in the Peloponnesos. Let them do all that and more. The Spartans had Lichas, Lichas of the old gods and the ways of the south, and that would be proved more than enough tomorrow.

But even now Lichas was not quite done. He then roused them with a final taunt, as he seemed to know all the Theban generals and why they had begged Mêlon to come down from Helikon. "So who of us kills the counterfeit Epaminondas? Who then kills the other general Pelopidas and with them their Theban plague of dêmokratia? Who sends this Thespian would-be savior, the broken-down farmer Mêlon who, the hag priestesses say, will kill us all, if he dares to show up—the so-called apple of women’s fables that kills our king. Who sends him to the houses of the dead?"

Who? Who?

"Egô Lichas. Egô. Not your Kleonymos. No, not my Antikrates. Not even sneaky Sphodrias here. No, I say it will be your Lichas. I am your Leônidas at Thermopylai reborn. The gods say no free man born of a free woman can kill me. Not tomorrow, not ever. You bet on others. I wager on Lichas—on myself. Sparta is as it was always before. We take the power we need and let others worry whether it’s fair. For all we care, these pigs are no better than Persians, and they will die as badly as well." Then Lichas lumbered down. The other three followed him with a shout. The leaders of the lochoi rushed up to the wagon, pushing and shoving the crowd ahead to touch the old man. They wanted their Lichas as king—Lichas their man of hard oak, by his speech and zeal capturing the hearts of thousands that the green-stick king Kleombrotos had lost despite his birth.

As Lichas finished, back across the plain in the Thespian camp high across the creek bed, Mêlon and his slave Chiôn were almost finished digging their armor from the wagon, cursing at the frayed straps and patched clasps since they had not put the full bronze of Malgis on in more than seven summers—since the last spear crossing near Tegyra beneath Mt. Ptôon. Finally at late dusk the two began to make their way slowly toward Epaminondas. His tent was in the gully below.

Gorgos was left back alone with the ox. The helot slave was sitting on the ground against a wagon wheel, happy enough to be alive with Chiôn gone. In vain, he once more strained for even more Doric sounds from his godly poet Tyrtaios, as those sweet melodies wafted in from the Spartan campfires across the gully. The music of old brought dreams of his son Nabis, the beardless boy he had left as an orphan long ago in smoky Lakonia, when Malgis had captured him up here in pig land.

Gorgos had been more than a helot in the south. He had risen to leader of the helots in Messenia, renamed by his masters Kuniskos, or so he claimed to the slaves on Mêlon’s farm. In his youth he was freed by the house of Lichas for his battle courage and had once become known even as Lord Kuniskos—Lichas’s fixer, the eyes and ears of the Spartan ephor and hero. Gorgos now dreamed that after the victory of Lichas at Leuktra perhaps he would return to Lakonia and be known this time as Kuniskos the Terrible—no longer Gorgos the snake man. Once the two, side-by-side, had spear-charged the Thebans at the great battle at the Nemea River—only to have Gorgos fall stunned, brought down and dragged out by Malgis the Thespian, bound with a rope on his way to servitude on Helikon, land of the pigs. Gone forever from his beloved master Lichas. Now he was old and had ended up as no more than Gorgos the dung spreader, who for twenty and three winters had emptied the slop jars in the vineyard of Malgis.

With Chiôn gone, Gorgos was soon napping at the wagon amid the flies of Aias. As he dozed, he chuckled out loud, as he went deeply back into the old dreams of his highland hideout, on his beloved mountain of Spartan Taygetos, far to the south in the Peloponnesos, where he was once more Kuniskos meting out justice for his lost son Nabis. Now he was cooking in his own hut, and laughing in his slumber that Nêto, and Chiôn, and Mêlon had just walked into his house, his own house, where his dinner, quite a meal, was ready for them all. There on Taygetos, the slaves were masters, and masters were slaves—though not in the way that his fellow dreamer Mêlon had thought.

CHAPTER 3

General Epaminondas

Mêlon was trying to pick up the soft sounds from the playing of Kopaic reeds as he and Chiôn neared the main tents of the Theban generals of Leuktra. The two were let inside by a few leather-clad sentries with felt caps, stoking the evening fires of Epaminondas.

At last here was the great Epaminondas. Their general, who would lead all the Boiotians tomorrow, did not look like much. Was this short fellow really the god who claimed he could chase a myriad of Spartans back home and turn Hellas into a single polis?

Epaminondas seemed to Mêlon dark and wiry, with shoulders almost too broad for his small frame. His beard was flecked with gray. Most of the head was without hair. But it was hard to tell since his scalp was leathery and dark from the wind and sun. Eyes, nose, mouth—they were all dark too, and blended in with beard and crusty face. He was neither old nor young, neither fair nor entirely foul—just burned and wrinkled. He was covered in something that looked more like hide or bark than real skin. No wonder, Mêlon thought, folk like this talk of freedom, and deathless souls and all the other code of the wild Pythagoras. Most ugly sorts on the wrong side of four decades usually do babble of god and the good they will do as their end nears—like the great rationalist Perikles himself, who wore an amulet around his neck and invited in the witches to chant in hopes that they might abate the boils and fevers from the great plague that ate his body away each hour.

The gear of this Iron Gut—sidêroun splangchon, his hoplites called Epaminondas—was cheap bronze, as dull as the panoply of Antikrates shone in the campfires across the way. The breastplate was cracked and dented. Cheap bronze patches were badly hammered on everywhere. Epaminondas wore no greaves. But he should have. His lower legs were scarred from ugly wounds. A tattered green cloak blew up over his shoulders. Mêlon’s eye fixed on his bare right spear arm. It was nearly as wide as Chiôn’s. A long scar went from his shoulder to his elbow. A worse oulê had reached his neck, right above the edge of his breastplate.

Mêlon looked for a general’s horsehair crest, a leader’s scarlet cloak, surely a gold sash of the usual Theban stratêgos. There was none—just an old round-topped Boiotian helmet and a cracked wooden shield without worn blazon. All those cuts and scars and he had still ended up a bald man with no money about to die fighting the Spartans. He was no peacock general. Or maybe one so marked by Ares that he more often suffered than gave blows in the mix-up. Whatever he believed in, he had believed in for a long time—and had fought for it, too. The nondescript, the poor and needy looking, these are far more dangerous revolutionaries than those with gold clasps and purple cloaks. Mêlon knew that, but he also sighed to Chiôn at his side, "Poor ugly Theban. He’s a walking wound. They must call him ho traumatias. And he is to lead us tomorrow?"

Five or six other stratêgoi of the Boiotian Confederation—the elected Boiotarchs of substance and repute—in new armor, were there to urge Epaminondas to start talking with King Kleombrotos. The generals chimed in that it was time to back out of the valley and beg Kleombrotos for peace. The army was outnumbered and out-positioned, the Boiotarchs protested. They offered talk and money as well to pay the Spartans to leave. The best of the Boiotarchs, Ladôn of seventy summers, who owned five hundred pomegranate trees near Anthedon on the coast and was too old to earn a fist for his slurs, threw his wadded-up cloak in the face of Epaminondas and spat out, Blood will be on your hands, Pythagorean. I figure Lichas would gladly take in payment some cows and grain to leave. Then he might let us be until next year. Unlike you, he prefers to do business than kill us.

Epaminondas ignored them. They all had white beards or big bellies, or wore purple cloaks or had hammered silver blazons to their shields, and so seemed to Epaminondas to think that their property mattered more than their honor. The generals were terrified that they would die en masse soon, given that they believed neither themselves nor any in the tent could stand up to the wall of Spartan shields and spears. And most liked the sun on their faces in the morning and were not about to give it up for the price of having Sparta ravage their grain each spring or some olive limbs in the fall, and install a few of their bothersome fixers on their acropoleis. Meanwhile the officers of the army looked only at their Epaminondas for a nod to fight or a sigh to go home. One look of hesitation, and seven thousand Boiotian hoplites would pack up their armor and head back to their fields. A fight broke out in back and knocked over two torches. Mêlon drew his curved knife—and wondered whether to unleash Chiôn, who cared little how many trees or years Ladôn claimed.

It now was almost dark, and the meeting was still little more than shouts and shoves. The Thebans of the Sacred Band, the three hundred elite hoplites who followed their general Pelopidas, were again playing their flutes in disdain, mocking the wavering generals and throwing the brawlers out into the latrine. Now they quietly put them away on the smile of Epaminondas. Mêlon saw again the blazon on the general’s shield propped up on a wooden stand, and could now make out that it was a crude picture of Orpheus—as if this Pythagorean would descend, like the flute player of myth, into the Hades of the Peloponnesos to bring the helots down south out of their serfdom, and thereby ensure their liberators that their souls, suddenly eternal, would be even happier in the hereafter once freed from their brief-lived bodies. Pelopidas and the rest of the Sacred Band, one hundred fifty pairs of warriors in green capes, had now ringed the camp. The uneasy crowd was mostly made up of the lesser officers of the merê from the outlying villages, the boroughs far from Thebes. Mêlon looked in vain for his son Lophis in the tent. But at least he heard horses outside, perhaps on the far hill, where the cavalry and his boy were camping. He noticed the snake eyes of Epaminondas watching to spot a shaking knee or a stained cloak of the trembling among his officers. Find that, Mêlon knew, and then get that man out, before his look swept over the entire group.

Ainias the Stymphalian had enough of the noise and shoves and he shouted above the crowd with a mere point to Mêlon, He’s here, here from Helikon. Ainias was an Arkadian mercenary, born by the gloomy lake at Stymphalos, with rumors of slaughter and gore to his name from the south below the Isthmos. He had earlier left word for the command to watch for the hoplite Mêlon of Thespiai, of prophecy fame. It was he who had sent his newfound friend Proxenos out to the high ground to look for wagons from Helikon. At least some were relieved at Mêlon’s sudden appearance. Ainias paid heed to the seers who had promised victory should an apple, a mêlon, join the army, and he knew that was the only way to win back the ranks for war. Even the generals now quieted when they noted the arrival of two such killers from Thespiai for the front line, old as one seemed to be, and even though the other brute was a branded slave.

Mêlon was pushed into the center of the crowd. Retainers stepped aside in deference to the son of Malgis. They knew he had fought at the Nemea, and the same year at Koroneia, and then later at Tegyra—and, in fact, in all the battles of the last thirty summers, after he went out with Malgis at his first battle at Haliartos and beat the Spartans back. In the three-sided open tent were another twenty officers of the provinces, crowded together in a closed circle around the general. As Chiôn strode in with Mêlon, no Boiotian wished to ask of his business. Most knew of this slave from Chios. They remembered that a few years earlier Chiôn had bashed Spartan skulls at Tegyra as he left the baggage train and joined in the pursuit. His branded face and bull’s neck won him offers of seats, even from men of Anthedon under the rich Boiotarch Ladôn. He said that he was here at Leuktra for his master. But who knew—maybe also for their own farms as well, or even to restore the name of disgraced Thespiai, since he planned to kill a Spartan king and walk over the corpses of the royal guard to get to him—Lichas’s most of all.

This was at last his moment. Chiôn, the Chian who never knew the island of Chios of his birth; Chiôn the snowy white one who had no affinity with the whiter Thrakians; Chiôn the slave who hated the slaves he knew far more than he did any free man. Chiôn was of nothing to anyone, nor anyone to him—except in battle, where his killing of the Spartans, or so he thought, would do far more for Hellas than any philosopher Alkidamas or Platôn.

Epaminondas moved over to a small bench, sipping some light barley and pork soup out of a black clay bowl with a long handle. He looked back over at the misanthrôpos Mêlon. He had never met the hoplite, but he sensed a kindred outsider who likewise had earned the distrust of the mob. Both perhaps would know each other by creed and need no formal greeting. Epaminondas rose in silence and laid an arm on Mêlon’s shoulder. He sat him down gently. Then the general began to laugh as if all these bad things had in fact turned out as he wished—as if he enjoyed the ruckus and the brawling over his plans.

Kleombrotos has come in from Kreusis by the sea—not where I thought by Chaironeia beneath Helikon. Now I reckon only seven thousand of our Boiotians bar his way from the agora of Thebes itself. They will have us as well for their relish. Epaminondas paced in tiny circles, and pointed to a few stools at the front of the crowd. Sit down in front of us over here, Mêlon of Helikon. The seers cry out that you, the lame one from Helikon, will not lose this battle. Yes, he—you—will cut down a Spartan king. Or so the mouths of the gods quietly sing in prophecy. Your name alone is worth a thousand hoplites. Most came here to join my army for you—not me—convinced a king would fall if you fight in the ranks beside them. But I knew you would come even without the prophecy, you alone of the Thespians, because you are the son of Malgis, the greatest hoplite that we Boiotians have yet put on the field of battle. You had no choice, you are of the Malgidai, and I wager you will prove tomorrow as good as or better than your father whom we knew well.

Well, Chiôn and I come as we are, Mêlon softly replied. The two of us fight in the ranks. Somewhere, my son Lophis, my only one, is with the horse. Take care of him. I wish only that we break their ranks tomorrow and kill their king or Lichas or both—then go home to Helikon without fear of Spartans in our vineyards. Mêlon was suddenly restless. He got up and continued as he paced, pointing his black iron sword at Epaminondas. Die or not, yes, we three will battle for the name of Malgidai. As for the rest of you—you, Lord Epaminondas—may say it is justice, for the equality of Pythagoras and for the freedom of helots to the south, and for democracy where men end up equal when they were not born that way, and for the promise that your souls will live on forever after your bodies rot—or for anything that you wish.

Epaminondas smiled at that. But then he rose and raised his voice as he strode into the center of the